by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
Our instructions for the next day, and all successive ones, were brilliant in their simplicity: HOLD, which is to say, do nothing, but of course, just as we’re stripping down for another cooling dip, mortars start dropping on our heads.
The donkey, unmoved by the previous few days’ bedlam, starts braying as the ANA dash for nonexistent cover and we remember with a surge of excitement that with CSgt Edgell and his fire support group, we’ve got a £70,000 solution to this problem. It is a curious counterpoint, firing the Javelin missile, compared to the close fighting we’ve been getting used to. The enemy mortar is over a mile away, and watching them load and fire through the fifteen-times magnification of the command launch unit, the whole thing is stand-off computer game and, instead of the hours which run like minutes in contact, the minutes seemed to last for hours as we set everything up and then wonder how to proceed.
The mid-morning sun is so bright it is difficult to make anything out through the binos. Squinting at the hill the other side of the river, I want to make absolutely sure that the trio scurrying around with what looks like a motorbike are definitely the enemy the ANA insist. We’re the only unit in position, so the commander on the net insists it’s my call and I’m about to bottle it when the next incoming round lands a little bit closer and the whole thing gathers its own momentum.
The ANA have gathered round in a spectacularly untactical huddle to watch the firing of the magic rocket and are clamouring for action. Even our recently acquired hardened-warrior posture slips as we take things to the next level and I am just praying for the little puff of smoke, the little sign, the little anything which would remove any doubt that we’re not about to drop a missile on someone for no reason. To increase the pressure, CSgt Edgell announces blithely that the rocket is now armed, so either we fire it or we have to throw it away. Either way the tax-payer is out of pocket, and we might as well have an explosion to show for it. To my relief, there’s a little puff of smoke on the hill just before the next round lands, dangerously close, and so it’s all systems go for the picture-book launch. The rocket obliges, popping out of the tube with a ferocious whoosh and hanging in the air for just that split second before the boosters kick in, and Sgt T shouts an encouraging ‘Go on, my son!’ as it speeds off and smashes the hill with an orange thump and whoops from our Afghans and a follow-up from all nine barrels of Worthers’ mortars. And the incoming stops.
Firing the first Javelin of the op was the icing on the cake. Our patrol harbour was a cluster of euphoric cheers and people comparing footage, and I was still staring with relief at the blackening pillar of smoke to the front, sweating and wondering exactly who it was on the receiving end. CSgt Edgell caught my eye and diffused the situation perfectly with a shake of his head and a chuckle: ‘Don’t worry, sir, they won’t be trying that again, whoever they were.’ I guess not.
The reality of our actions is brought home that afternoon. The Anglians drag in more of the dead bodies from yesterday’s clearance patrol, and after all the high-fiving of the deadly Javelin firing there is a release in the macabre task of loading the trailer with the ghoulish and stiffening corpses, and it isn’t the cloying smell but the swilling in the body bags, reserved for the unlucky bastard turned inside out by the Apache 30mm cannon.
And still there is time to rest. Being by the water is like being on the beach, just without the ice-creams. No one stays down for long when all you have to do to cool off is haul yourself to your feet and take a running jump in, lie back and allow the current to float you downstream to the footbridge where the ANA have centralized all their stores next to the marijuana fields. Which was a mystery until I swam past and, catching a whiff of something different in the air, paddled to the bank and rounded the bushes to see a section of Pashtuns squatting over an enormous mound of freshly harvested weed. We knew that they smoked and had simply hoped they wouldn’t do it out on patrol, but it seemed that the reports of drug runners owning a lot of the land were not wrong and the stash was so enormous that it was hard to be anything other than amused, and before we ordered them to get rid of it all we took running jumps on to the heap and lay on our backs, making ‘hemp angels’.
As the Engineers arrive to build the patrol base, the Hesco-bastion fortress which will mark in edifice our new front line and the achievements of our op, the air is thick with the unmistakable smell, and a crowd of ANA gather dancing around the pile which the wise-arse sergeants have just set on fire. For the rest of the week a fug of rich hemp smoke hangs over the canal, which makes for a very chilled couple of days guarding the Engineers and their tractors while they build like ants. To our rear, Will and Sgt Gillies play hide-and-seek in the ganja fields and must be getting the worst of the paranoia and the munchies from our little bonfire because every time we meet up with them they’re exhausted and shooting at shadows.
We get our first bit of media ops when the Anglians drop off their embedded reporter at our location. ‘Fat Al’ has communications gadgetry that should have made whoever procured our own crap kit blush, and within minutes of flopping down behind the still-smouldering ganja he’s online, checking the football scores for the boys, while I try to smile, thinking of all the times in the last few days I’ve had to dash all over the place for a ‘face-to-face’ as our own comms routinely let us down. I’m sceptical of the press, always what we call the ‘Goldilocks’ distance behind the fighting (not too hot, not too cold, just right), but for all that he’s a bit ill-informed and full of gushing praise for the REMFs he’s just travelled up with—two days late to the front line, and where does he think we’ve been all that time?—it’s hard not to feel a frisson as he chats back live to the UK (in the half-time break in the Liverpool vs. Chelsea game, so Sgt T is almost creaming).
It’s not just my e-mails any more, it’s stomach-churningly, fistpumpingly real, and the news reporter in his blue flak jacket is actually talking about us: ‘… under a full moon, strangely beautiful up on the front line in the Taliban-dominated Lower Sangin Valley with the Queen’s Company and their partnered ANA on the site of the last few days’ fierce fighting …’
Patrol Base South
The structure that rises out of nowhere in the next thirty-six hours as the Engineers work away is incredible and cements Hesco in my mind as one of the genius ideas of recent times. So staggeringly simple all I can feel gazing at the signature blue logo is envy and admiration for the lucky vision of James Heselden, who saw the direction the world was going and started making the stuff. Where once the grunts would have toiled for weeks to build sandbag structures, the Engineers fill lightweight steel-cage boxes with rubble and hardcore for instant blast-proof protection—the Lego-brick building block of every camp and war of the last twenty years. In one night the Sappers flattened what had been the mound at the sluice-gates and ate chunks out of the bank to fill the Hesco walls, which went up 2 metres high in a neat and impregnable triangle, barely 20 metres by 10 at its widest but a hell of a lot better than sleeping under the WMIKs in the dirt, which had been our bed up till then.
The nice touches are added last: the sangar positions at each apex hotly contested for the cool shade of the tin roof, the twin desert-roses—our own drainpipe urinals—defiant in the middle of the base and the luxury of a double wooden throne above the burning shitters at the back. All the painstaking Sandhurst harbour lessons came to mind—pacing out the perimeter, unfurling twine from the fishing rod reels we bought just for the purpose and digging in our little shell-scrapes, wondering what was the point because we knew as soon as we were attacked the CSgt would make us bug out anyway. We wouldn’t be bugging out of Patrol Base South.
Patrol Base South was ours to defend—one of three forts on the new ‘front line’, a hard shoulder providing elusive ‘security’ for Gereshk back down the valley. Commanding awesome views over the Green Zone straight up the river valley, arcs linking in to the WFRs’ firepower up on the high ground to the flank in Patrol Base North and a cheery kilometre away from Will
and Amber 61 down in Patrol Base Centre—so relieved no longer to be on the constant move that they gratefully occupied the vulnerable middle position without a murmur. Maybe because we were so excited to be settling into somewhere we could actually defend—somewhere we could more than half-sleep through the nights, jumpy at the slightest grunt from the donkey, convinced that the Taliban were slipping back into the positions—it took us by surprise when Aziz, the toolay zabit (the ANA’s equivalent of a company sergeant major), came forward with young Nasrullah, who had tears streaming down his cheeks.
We’d taken bets back in Shorabak on how young Nasrullah actually was. He claimed eighteen, which there was no way was true and was too on the nose to be believed by us who’d learned the hard way to lie big if you didn’t want to get ID-ed heading into the Crown on a Friday night. His blue eyes gleaming with defiance, he had waited until now to admit that he’d been shot two days previously, half his thumb blown away and now a rancid pulp in a bandage, so we just stood round in awe of the calm look on his face, barely wincing as LSgt Rowe applied some sort of proper dressing to the mess and realizing with guilty relief that he needed further treatment and we finally had a legitimate excuse for a run back into camp.
It seemed weeks not days since we had fought up the towpath for hours we mockingly drove back down in minutes with the wind in our hair and the taste of NAAFI stock already in our hungry mouths. It seemed like we were older and wiser driving past the dam, where we had fired our first rounds a week before, but we weren’t, just hungry and tired and bearded and dirty.
It was amazing coming in and staring down the comfy-in-the-rear G4 types who didn’t like our dirty combats but could hardly stop us from getting our first fresh lunch in a week and amazing hearing the subtle intonation of the officer in the ops room who turned round as I was signing us in and said, ‘So you’re Amber 63.’
Amazing phoning home with shaky hands and clicking ‘send’ on e-mails we’d waited days and years and lifetimes to send. Amazing after all the hyped-up faint contacts and unapologetically and honestly typed-up tense patrols and warning shots, finally downloading the never-look-back glorious melee on the dam and the rapture of a real fight.
Amazing cramming junk food in the NAAFI, coming back up on the sugar high with the sickening combo of blue Gatorade, ice-cream and toffee popcorn. Staring open-mouthed at Nelly Furtado on the TV, fit in a fringe beyond our wildest fantasies with Timbaland yelping away in her ear, and everything else meant nothing at all to me.
It was amazing, but it was a holiday, and for all the creature comforts even after the first hour we knew we were enjoying it because we weren’t staying. Stocked up with Pringles and cookies and fresh newspapers, we felt as good pushing back out through Gereshk to our new castle on the river as we had done coming in.
Back at Patrol Base South I realized we could relax in a way we never could back in FOB Price. FOB Price was cool and comfortable and well fed and safe, but we always knew it was only a matter of time before the vehicles would be mended or the batteries charged or the errand run and we’d have to punch back out to the line. Vulnerable on the front with a tin pan for a loo and hammocks strung up between the Hesco walls, we knew we weren’t getting back to the air-con and laptops and camp-cots back in Shorabak any time soon, but at least there was nowhere else anyone could send us, at least it was home.
The heat was up to its old tricks again, playing havoc with Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and with the sound of more gunfire I realised I probably wouldn’t finish my chapter. For a moment I was nostalgic for the stifling heat of southern Iraq, which seemed positively benign compared to the scorching-hot machine-gun cartridges that started to set the drying pages of the Penguin Classic smouldering, and though no one would really notice the loss in the middle of another hellish ambush I wonder if the Taliban might allow themselves a snicker if they knew—I had a feeling Rand’s pioneering and starkly beautiful objectivism might not chime with their philosophy. Although you could say that a 1,000-lb bomb destroying their firing positions and reducing the mud-hut compounds to rubble and dust was the sort of revenge Roark would have enjoyed.
The ANA, most of them illiterate, crowded around in a frenzy of interest whenever I started reading, awed that I would even bring a book out with me and rapturous when I showed them the plates in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and they realised I was reading about Afghanistan, about their home. What struck me with the arrival of each tantalising parcel was the extent to which Afghanistan seemed to have captured the popular literary imagination anew, in a way Iraq hadn’t. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, were part of a rich literary seam rooted in the forbidding mountains, passes and tribes of the land we found ourselves in—older and more complex by far than arbitrary lines on maps and ‘national’ boundaries. A piece by Maya Jasanoff in the battered, lonely and very lost edition of The London Review of Books which found its way to one of our outstations, remarked upon the peculiarly English (perhaps peculiarly English public schoolboy) habit of following the imperial literary heritage and adventuring off to the Northwest Frontier. I guess she meant the romantic Rory Stewart, then to be found striding around Kabul in full salwar kameez and pakol hat, and I thought about his Balliol-to-Iraq-to-Afghanistan adventures and had a strange sense of joining that heritage.
In the remaining compound room undamaged by mortar and rocket fire, I was astonished to find nestled among the well-thumbed ‘lads mags’ and Bernard Cornwells Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. And I was delighted to see one of my boys (who confesses to having read nothing without pictures since he left school at sixteen) devouring it.
Of course there was less and less time for reading, and little room for books on the wagons when we hadn’t enough water and ammunition. What surfaced instead was the surprising power of our cultural heritage. The vivid imagery of the First World War poets is powerfully and almost subconsciously evoked when life is reduced to such an immediate and pressing focus that everything else slips away. I remembered Wilfred Owen’s own imagined death in ‘Strange Meeting’—‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped / Down some profound dull tunnel long since scooped’—and how the reality of the battlefield, so obvious and pressing, seems to slide away. Misreporting of incidents and the perceived lack of awareness at home gave new meaning to Sassoon’s vituperate lines from ‘Suicide in the Trenches’, and the lads nodded approvingly when I managed to drag them up from memory—‘You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye / Who cheer when soldier lads march by / Sneak home and pray you’ll never know / The hell where youth and laughter go’.
At least Patrol Base South was sufficiently far forward not to be bothered too much by the press and the politics which swarmed around the rear as silly season started at home and all the news was apparently Afghanistan. Fingers had been wagging and blame had been apportioned in the Brigade HQ in Lashkar Gah ever since the Today programme had run a story about soldiers on the front line complaining about communications and vehicles.
Journalists were a fact of life, but it didn’t stop them being a pain in the arse. The best-case scenario would be a formal embed, a reporter with you for a week, maybe two, ideally with his own protection team so that he wouldn’t need babysitting. The documentary crews out for the long haul gained the most respect, came closest to becoming ‘part of the team’ and would then get accused of losing their impartiality once they got home and their programmes were made. The junior commanders bore the brunt of the extra work the reporters generated—subjected to not only the scrutiny of whoever or whatever it was reporting on your particular job but also the extra interest of the more senior officers who invariably swarmed like flies whenever cameras were near, and all the while we kept half an ear open just in case one of the lads in a moment of artless naivety should stray too far ‘off message’. Which must have been what had happened during Silicon, as angry messages from HQ demanded to know from whom the
BBC could possibly have got the idea that there weren’t enough vehicles.
Well there must have been more than 500 troops on the start-line, and that would have narrowed it down to about any one of them they had spoken to. We’d fought our way forward in a WMIK we’d borrowed from the mechanics back in Bastion and which turned out not to have a spare tyre. Then again at least we had wheels, which must have made the Anglians slogging through on foot pretty jealous. We had two WMIKs for each team, six in total without counting Tac, which was just as well because on more than one occasion we limped back to the workshop in FOB Price in a sorry convoy, the last three that worked towing the three broken down; iconic or not, they were vulnerable—metaphorically and, potentially, literally a pain in the arse. And we were the lucky ones. The WFRs were probably whingeing loudest as they deployed all the way up to the line in Snatch and even plain old Land Rovers. The line was that we had enough vehicles to go round, and if you counted the ones the RAF were using for shuttle runs to Timmy Horton’s Coffee Shop in Kandahar we probably did, but try telling that to the miserable private bouncing over minefields in a glorified car.
I didn’t doubt that someone somewhere, tired on stag, had whinged to a reporter. There were enough of them around and they knew what they were doing; giving a wide berth to the officers, who at least had rudimentary media training, chumming up to the boys with satellite phones and fresh rations and then waiting for something controversial to slip out. I suppose what riled us about the media, especially the journalists who flitted in and out like butterflies and got snaps of themselves looking stubbly in the desert and then back up to Kabul to flirt with the NGO girls, was that they hadn’t earned the right to broadcast our whingeing. Soldiers whinge and purge and moan, that’s what kept us going, and, as the old saying went, the top brass should only really start worrying when the guys on the ground stop complaining. The well-intentioned journalists might even have been bemused at our resentment, thought they were doing us a favour, fighting our corner in public in a way we weren’t allowed to—but that was the point. We were like a family, allowed to slag each other off and curse and damn each other for all we were worth, but someone who wasn’t related didn’t have that right.